Benjamin R. Barber
Published in the Los
Angeles Times, November 17, 2002
Osama bin Laden, it appears, is back. Which means even after Iraq
is disarmed, which it will certainly be one way or another, Al Qaeda
will continue its campaign of destruction and terror. As the United
States impatiently waits for weapons inspections to fail so it can
open a second front in the war on terrorism, it has nowhere near
closed out the first front. The Taliban has been run out, but Afghanistan
is by no means stable. Pakistan has become a principal U.S. ally,
but tens of thousands of Wahabi fundamentalist religious schools
(madrasas) continue preparing the next generation of zealots for
their jihad.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when President Bush declared
that any state harboring terrorists would be a potential target
of U.S. military force, America has crafted anti-terrorist policies
as if we still lived in a 19th century world where the only enemies
of states were other states.
But in the 21st century world of globalization and interdependence,
malevolent nongovernmental operations like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah,
hiding in the creases of the new global disorder, are the real enemies.
Destroying the regimes that harbor them will be ineffective, because
such states include not only a handful of rogues, but also allies
like Pakistan and Egypt, European friends like Germany and Britain
and even states within the continental U.S. Remember, Florida and
New Jersey inadvertently harbored terrorists.
America has lived for two centuries with the myth of its independence,
sure that its sovereignty would protect it from outside aggression.
After all, before Sept. 11, the last major assault by foreigners
on mainland American soil was the British attack on the White House
and the Capitol in 1814. But our sovereign independence, already
under siege from new forms of global disease, global technology,
global crime, global ecology and global markets, came under direct
assault on Sept. 11.
The moment has come for a new "declaration of interdependence"
that will embrace America's fully joining the world to which it
is ever more seamlessly bound. For interdependence means no nation,
however powerful, can impose its will on others. It means that as
long as a child in Cairo lives in poverty, no U.S. child can live
in safety. It means that the wealthiest nation cannot flourish unless
those in the most impoverished have opportunities to grow.
War (or its threat) can take out a coterie of terrorists and bring
this or that rogue state to heel and thereby help eliminate that
malevolent interdependence that terrorism has both created and exploited.
But to construct a benevolent interdependence is another matter:
It entails strengthening international law, reinforcing multilateralism
and spreading equality.
For these tasks, military might is not only ineffective but sometimes
counterproductive. It was no accident that after two devastating
world wars into which the United States was drawn, America became
the chief architect of an international framework for law, cooperation
and economic development. Its effort put the first positive face
on a benevolent interdependence that not only paid tribute to America's
best democratic instincts and altruistic generosity but that also
reflected its best interests.
Why, then, as terrorism puts its exclamation point on the new age
where interdependence is more real than ever, is the Bush administration
insisting on a traditional sovereignty that it has already lost
and a unilateralist strategy of preventive war that cannot succeed?
Not only has it withdrawn from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty and turned its back on the international criminal court (an
ideal instrument to prosecute international terrorists), it has
weakened the monitoring provisions of the chemical weapons convention
and defunded programs aimed at dealing with the "loose nukes"
left behind by the breakup of the Soviet Union. It has insisted
on unilateralism and force in a world demanding more cooperation
and multitrack strategies that focus on education as well as arms,
and on economic opportunity no less than inspections compliance.
The globalized world will remain a dangerous place for Americans
until ways are found either to democratize globalization or globalize
democracy. In a world defined by doctors without frontiers and banks
without borders, there must also be democracy without frontiers
and citizens without borders.
To create such a world is the work of governments, as well as of
civil associations and the private sector, and it cannot be accomplished
by states alone or exclusively by force of arms. It means finding
ways to make not only smart bombs but smart kids; a dollar spent
on education today may save $100 on weapons 10 years from now because
a potential terrorist has become an educated citizen. It means transnational
NGOs, responsible multinational companies and innovative forms of
global governance. It means genuine diversity -- not only our own
familiar tolerance for religious pluralism, but a tolerance for
religion itself; not only religions that are tolerant of secularism,
but a secularist materialism that reins itself in enough to be respectful
of religion.
At this moment in history, Islamic and Hindu parents in the Third
World (and some Christian parents in the First World) have two fears
about the future. The first is the fear that their children will
be left out of modernity, deprived of the opportunity to join the
global marketplace and share in its products and prosperity. The
second is that their children will be included in modernity, join
the global marketplace and, as a consequence, lose their religious
roots and cultural morals. They would be saved from poverty only
to be plunged into corruption.
A civil and civilized world -- call it CivWorld -- must be one
where liberty is not secured at the price of equality and pluralism
does not demand the corruption of morals; where no nation, however
powerful, can force the world to join it unless it first acknowledges
it is part of the world; where strong nations are willing not only
to make war on terrorists but to share the sources of their strength
with the weak; and where warriors against the axis of evil are also
willing to become soldiers against the axis of inequality and tutors
to the axis of despair -- the invisible twins of the axis of evil.
Killing Bin Laden and disarming Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
will mean little if, as we bring down the "evil ones,"
we fail to raise up a democratic architecture of interdependence
in its place.
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